More Than Happiness

Buddhist and Stoic Wisdom for a Sceptical Age

Antonia Macaro

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781785781346
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Mental Health & Wellbeing

'This groundbreaking study provides a much-needed philosophical framework for those practising mindfulness as well as a call to recover the pragmatic and therapeutic dimensions of philosophy.' - Stephen Batchelor, author of After Buddhism and Secular Buddhism Modern readers tend to think of Buddhism as spending time alone meditating, searching for serenity. Stoicism calls to mind repressing our emotions in order to help us soldier on through adversity. But how accurate are our popular understandings of these traditions? And what can we learn from them without either buying in wholeheartedly to their radical ideals or else transmuting them into simple self-improvement regimes that bear little resemblance to their original aims? How can we achieve more than happiness? In More than Happiness, Antonia Macaro delves into both philosophies, focusing on the elements that fit with our sceptical age, and those which have the potential to make the biggest impact on how we live. From accepting that some things are beyond our control, to monitoring our emotions for unhealthy reactions, to shedding attachment to material things, there is much, she argues, that we can take and much that we'd do better to leave behind.In this synthesis of ancient wisdom, Macaro reframes the 'good life', and gets us to see the world as it really is and to question the value of the things we desire. The goal is more than happiness: living ethically and placing value on the right things in life.

Chapter 1

SETTING THE SCENE

What do we really know?

Bodh Gaya, in the Indian state of Bihar, is nowadays a busy part of the world, full of crowded, noisy temples. Buddhist pilgrims from the four corners come to pay homage to the place where the Buddha is said to have attained his awakening, under a Ficus religiosa – subsequently also known as a Bodhi tree. The current tree is just over a century old, although its lineage is supposed to go back to the original tree. We don’t really know. The truth is that we don’t really know much about the story of the Buddha at all.

The kernel from which the legend of the Buddha grew might go something like this: Gotama, the future Buddha, lived at some point in the fifth century BCE and died sometime around 400 BCE, give or take twenty years. He probably lived at least part of his life in north-eastern India. At that time in India there was an established culture of wanderers and renouncers – people who had given up a conventional social role and become mendicants, dedicating themselves to the spiritual life. What this meant exactly was understood differently by different groups, but it generally revolved around ascetic practices and meditative techniques. Gotama left a comfortable background to pursue this lifestyle, sought instruction from teachers and experimented with but ultimately rejected extreme asceticism. Eventually he had an awakening, a powerful transformative experience that led him to establish a small group of followers at first, and then teach all over northern India for many years, dying in old age.

The texts embellish this story with many details, some more fantastical than others. The future Buddha, for instance, descends from Tusita heaven into his mother’s womb. His birth is accompanied by many portents, such as being welcomed by gods and the appearance of a splendid light. The priests declare to his father, a king, that his son has the marks of a Great Man, predicting he will become either a great king or a Buddha. He is brought up in luxury but becomes disillusioned with his life through a series of encounters: with an old man, a sick man, a dead man and an ascetic. This prompts his departure and subsequent spiritual search, enlightenment and teaching.

While its bare bones may well have some historical basis, the story of the Buddha is to be taken as legend rather than biography. A similar story was also told of a disciple of the Buddha, Vasa: ‘The son of a wealthy gildmaster in Vārānasi, he wakes up one night with feelings of disgust for the life of licentious luxury that surrounds him. He escapes from the house and the city gates open miraculously for him. However, instead of having to search for a religious teacher, he goes straight to Śākyamuni who is teaching in the Deer Park.’1 Was this a common story of the time, maybe some kind of ideal life trajectory?

More than that, the story of the Buddha’s life as it is usually told also applies to all the other Buddhas that are said to have preceded Gotama, of which there are a few. In one discourse the Buddha tells the story of his manifold previous lives, starting with Buddha Vipassī 91 aeons ago (an aeon being basically a very long period of time), through to the Buddhas Sikhī, Vessabhū, Kakusandha, Konāgamana and Kassapa, and ending with the current Buddha. Similarities and differences are listed: which clan they belonged to, under what tree they were awakened and so on. Lifespan, through these countless aeons, reduced from 80,000 years in the time of Vipassī, to scarcely a hundred in the time of Gotama.2

Differences in timescale and detail notwithstanding, the essentials are the same. Vipassī’s biography has exactly the same turning points as Gotama’s: the descent from Tusita heaven; the encounters with an old man, a sick man and a dead man; the decision to leave his comfortable surroundings to embrace the homeless spiritual life; the awakening; the teaching. This generic Buddha-story may well have preceded the full telling of Gotama’s life in the Buddhist texts, which seems to suggest that the life course described is more like a typical Buddha’s CV than a historical record.

The appeal of the idea that there is history and biography lurking in the early Buddhist texts if only we can discover it is irresistible, but it has been discarded as wishful thinking by more than one scholar. The story of the Buddha was never intended as pure history. These texts are the stuff of myth and legend and so they will remain. There may well have been a real person at the root of the Buddha’s legend, but history and myth cannot be disentangled.3

As for the Buddha’s teachings, despite modern books having titles like What the Buddha Taught, we don’t really know what that was either. The main body of work that has been handed down over the centuries as containing the teachings of the Buddha is known as the Pāli Canon. This is divided into three areas: discourses (suttas), monastic rules and commentaries.

The texts that make up the Pāli Canon had been transmitted orally for centuries before being committed to writing. It seems that individual followers would specialise in reciting particular kinds of texts, and there would be scope for adjusting length, or detail, according to context. The Canon manifests all the features of oral literature: mnemonic formulae, overlapping lists, repetitions, stock descriptions (sometimes ending up in the wrong places). The doctrinal discrepancies and contradictions that show up in the texts could be due to several reasons, for instance that teachings varied according to context and purpose, that competing schools left their mark in different places, or that doctrines from non-Buddhist schools were gradually incorporated.

Contemporary scholarship is split between those who believe it is possible somehow to isolate the original teachings from later interpretations and those who are more sceptical. But even if we believe that at least some of those teachings have been preserved in the Canon, it would be naive to think that this records the words of the Buddha exactly as he spoke them. Even the early discourses would have undergone potentially major changes in the few generations after the Buddha, and probably reflect later developments. Late additions are likely to be found cheek by jowl with earlier material. The layers are likely to be so interwoven as to make it extremely challenging, maybe impossible, to separate the Buddha’s own thought from that of those who followed him.

We know a little more about Stoicism. The school was founded by Zeno of Citium around 300 BCE. Its name came from the location of Stoics’ meetings: the Stoa Poikile, or painted porch, in Athens’ city centre. This is now an unkempt, fenced-off area where cats roam and adjacent buildings are adorned with graffiti. But at the time it was part of a busy public area, where many other philosophical schools were peddling their wares: Cynics and Epicureans were active, and older centres of learning like Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum were still open. Zeno was followed by Cleanthes and then Chrysippus as head of the Stoics, the latter often considered the most significant early Stoic figure. Teaching continued until sometime in the first century BCE, when the centre of gravity of the tradition shifted to Rome, by then the main cultural centre of the Western world.

But a lot is unknown. The writings of the early, Greek Stoic philosophers are mostly lost, their ideas known mainly through other writers’ accounts. This is why reconstructing their views is an uncertain task, especially since those later authors were often hostile towards Stoicism. The work of the Roman Stoics – Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius – on the other hand, has survived through the centuries, either as writings by the philosophers themselves or as notes taken by their students. By the beginning of the third century CE the Stoic school was declining, but the Roman Stoics continued to influence philosophers and psychologists with almost unbroken popularity until today.

Similarities between Hellenistic philosophical schools (dating from the fourth century BCE, the time of Alexander the Great) and early Indian philosophy are often remarked on. There are intriguing, if wispy, glimpses of cultural transmission between India and the Greek world, but few hard facts. The geographical link between the two cultural spheres was the vast area covered first by the Persian Empire and then by the empire of Alexander the Great, through which trade and diplomatic routes developed. The Buddhist scholar Stephen Batchelor remarks that there was no ‘East’ and ‘West’ at that time, and that the ‘world of the 5th and 4th centuries BCE that extended from Athens to Pāṭaliputta was in many respects a single, interactive cultural sphere.’4

A central character in this story is the Greek sceptical philosopher Pyrrho of Elis, who around 334 BCE travelled to north-east India with Alexander the Great. He wrote nothing himself, but we know something of his thought through other authors’ texts. Diogenes Laertius, who documented the lives of Greek philosophers, tells us that meeting Indian sages led Pyrrho ‘to adopt a most noble philosophy … taking the form of agnosticism and suspension of judgement’, and that this was held to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Setting the Scene
• Chapter 2: Dukkha Happens: We Suffer
• Chapter 3: Maladies of the Soul: Why We Suffer
• Chapter 4: How to Be Saved 1: Nirvana
• Chapter 5: How to Be Saved 2: Living in Accordance with Nature
• Chapter 6: More Than Happiness
• Chapter 7: Removing the Dust from Our Eyes
• Chapter 8: The Sage and the Buddha: Models for Living
• Chapter 9: Spiritual Practice: Beyond Theory
• Chapter 10: Meditations for a Better Life
• References
• Acknowledgements
• Index
• Copyright